What's in a Name? How we Named Moonlight and its Token

Coining a new name: beginning with the product

To be honest, names are hard. Like a lot of teams, we began by dreaming up whatever we thought sounded pretty awesome. Names like PANTHEON, MONEY COIN, PARAGON, and MEGADRAGON. We never did get very far with that – none of them really made sense. (And honestly, nobody remembers who suggested "MONEY COIN". Nobody's ever owned up to it either.)

So, instead, we looked to what we do for inspiration.

Our platform was one that would facilitate the decentralization of work, allow people to manage projects independently, and help lead to institutional adoption of blockchain based platforms like Neo. One of its use cases is to allow for freelancing paid in crypto. Well, another word for freelancing is to "moonlight" – combine that with the crypto community's love of "moon"… and we had ourselves a winner.

(Side note: although the platform does allow for freelancing, unlike any other platform, it also makes possible the creation of validated teams of arbitrary size, making it vastly more useful for industry players like Google and Microsoft as a project management and staffing tool.)

The token issue

Even though we had a name for the platform, it was really only a matter of time before people began asking us about our token. We decided to name our token Moonlight Lux.

Why Lux?

According to Wikipedia: "The lux (symbol: lx) is the SI derived unit of illuminance and luminous emittance, measuring luminous flux per unit area. It is equal to one lumen per square metre." Moonlight, which reaches around 0.1 lx on a full moon, is also measured in Lux. Therefore, the more Lux you own, the more "Moonlight" you have! The name couldn't be any more perfect.

A ticking time bomb

Every trading token needs a ticker symbol. This is a practice taken from stock exchanges. According to Investopedia, "A ticker symbol is an arrangement of characters (usually letters) representing a particular security listed on an exchange or otherwise traded publicly." In crypto, we have things like BTC, LTC, and ETH. There is no technical limit to how long your symbol can be, but usually it's 2-4 characters.

With our ticker symbol, we wanted it to truly represent what our token and project is. Ordinarily, one might guess, "Well, your token's going to be $LUX, or $MOON, isn't it?!" And certainly, those are good guesses – except for a couple of issues. Both of them are already trading, and $MOON didn't really sound like something an institutional company would take very seriously. We were also in contact with LuxCore, the team behind the LuxCoin, and in the interest of reducing confusion and increasing cooperation between crypto teams, we decided that it would be in our mutual best interests to use a symbol other than $LUX.

At this point, you might expect us to go back to the drawing board.

But then… we realized that the answer was in front of our eyes all along. You'll recall from Wikipedia… "The lux (symbol: lx) is the SI derived unit of illuminance and luminous emittance, measuring luminous flux per unit area." The symbol LX had already been used to represent Lux, luminance, for decades in the scientific field. And if it's good enough for millions of the world's foremost researchers over dozens of years, well, that makes it good enough for us too!

Therefore, our ticker symbol will be $LX.

Concluding remarks

If you enjoyed reading through our thought process, let us know! We place the community first and foremost and would love to hear your voices.

Our token sale is expected to be in Q2 of 2018, so look forward to seeing Moonlight Lux ($LX) trading on an exchange at a near point in the future.